Within the UW-Madison College of Engineering this year, 17 professional academic advisors are currently serving 6,600 students.
That means each advisor is assigned to meet with and guide more than 388 students, a ratio well above the national standard of 300 students to one advisor.
Wren Singer, director of the UW-Madison Office of Undergraduate Advising, said that system-wide funding cuts have exacerbated the issue of assigning more students to each advisor.
She said there have been recent cuts to advising positions at the university, as well as vacant advising spots left unfilled, causing some programs to now push many more students per advisor. The Department of English advisor, for example, serves roughly 450 students.
“That’s starting to get a little tighter than we’d like it to get,” Singer said.
UW-Madison is not the only school where advising services feel the budget crunch, however. In the recently released summaries of budget implications on UW System campuses, seven other schools cited reductions in the area, including UW-Green Bay, UW-Oshkosh and UW-River Falls.
Officials from UW-Platteville reported that 28 percent of their 2015-’16 budget reduction will be taken from instructional activities, which will result in reduced advising time. UW-La Crosse’s summary showed 45 positions eliminated from divisions like Student Affairs and Academic Affairs, which could have a negative effect on advising services for students.
Additionally, UW-Stevens Point cut three positions in its Academic Advising and Career Services, and UW-Superior eliminated the director of its Student Success Center, which is home to career services and an academic advising center.
Singer explained that because advisors on campus are committed to serving students, it may be hard for those students to notice immediately the strain the services are under.
Funds were provided to produce “temporary patches” so students would not feel the impact right away, but Singer also said the temporary money her office had is now used up and some students could start being affected as early as next year.
Singer said the impact will first fall on the employees themselves, creating “unreasonable expectations” of the work they must do to make up for the cuts.
“The kind of things you would experience are longer waits, more hurried advisors, maybe advisors that aren’t as well trained because they don’t have as much time to do training,” Singer said. “We might have to cut down on the kind of specialty advising for different areas, and so forth.”
Singer added that students who miss out on a good relationship with their advisors may not make timely decisions related to declaring their major, preparing for a career and tracking their path to graduation.
Advising is something that needs to be done by people, Singer explained.
“It's hard to replace the conversation that a person has with a student about your interests, your thoughts, your dreams, what you want to do with your life,” Singer said. “There are aspects of advising that can be replaced by technology, but technology costs money too. All of these things, when there are budget cuts, are suffering.”
